AUSTRALIA
J-Wire
March 12, 2015 by J-Wire News Service
The NSW Jewish Board of Deputies has established a Task Force on Child Protection that will focus on the welfare of children in communal institutional settings.
The taskforce is headed by University of NSW Emeritus Professor Bettina Cass, who chairs the Board’s Social Justice Committee and contains eminent members of our community who specialise in the area of child protection.
The task force will develop and roll-out on-going seminars and workshops, the first of which will begin in June this year, that will focus on child safety policies and practices, the prevention of child abuse, procedures to protect children against abuse within Jewish institutional and community settings and the mandatory obligation to report to police.
“We will be contacting every Jewish communal institution –religious and lay– in NSW to invite them to be part of this critically important initiative” NSW Jewish Board of Deputies President Jeremy Spinak said. “We can’t simply say, ‘well the Royal Commission’s over, there’s nothing left to do. The solemn comments made following the commission hearings will count for naught if we don’t follow-up with serious, meaningful grass-roots change. That’s what the task force is seeking to do.”
Professor Cass said that due to the importance of the subject matter she expects strong communal participation in the initiative. “The key principle of the taskforce is that the foremost and overriding concern of all our educational and other community institutions and individuals associated with them is the physical, emotional and psychological protection of every child who comes within their system,” she said. “The rights of our children to that protection must be accorded priority in all our processes and actions.”
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